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“... presence somewhere offstage: ‘dark Ahab’, ‘wild Ahab’, ‘moody stricken Ahab’, ‘black terrific Ahab’, ‘crazy Ahab’, ‘inflexible Ahab’, ‘untottering Ahab’, Ahab with his ‘despot eye’. It would be strange, all the same, if our appreciation of his tragic character, his Promethean ambition and his radicalism – the ability to ...”

“... ascent. In July 1933, he married Honor Guinness, daughter of the Second Earl of Iveagh, whose black stuff from the brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin had made the family enormously rich. In best 18th-century fashion, Channon acquired a fortune, a house in Belgrave Square, a country house at Kelvedon in Essex and a seat in the House of ...”

“... throats.’ We sat smoking, listening to the reaction of the Archbishop and the news of how Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, ‘deplores the event’.The tube to Victoria cost more than double what I had made all day. There was a girl at the top of the stairs when I got there. The place was packed: it was a good spot. After talking to me warily a ...”

“... Tikvah, who introduced me to a chain-smoking, grey-haired man whom everyone addressed as Mikado. Michael Warchavski runs the AIC and is married to Lea Tsemel, whom I have known for a decade as an indefatigable Israeli lawyer stubbornly defending Palestinians in Israeli courts. Reminding me that Israel is an intensely legalistic country and that the only ...”

“... accursed isle! Literature, art, conversation, society – everything lies dead beneath its black shadow.’In order to write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of ...”

“... waylay him, but succeeded only once, in November 1935. Clutching their dog Polly and wearing the black shirt of the British Union of Fascists – which she may have joined to please her husband, who had on one occasion expressed some admiration for Mussolini – she managed to get close enough to him after one of his public lectures to ask when he would be ...”

“... that transcends ‘the left-right divide’. He seemed proud of quotes he’d found that made Michael Oakeshott echo Hannah Arendt – ‘whose work has really influenced my work’ – and Matthew Arnold agree with Lenin, though ‘you couldn’t be further apart than Lenin and Arnold on most things.’ It’s difficult to give a fair account of his ...”

“... John Knox’s church drew its theological ideas from constant European travel, the movement of black-clad divines between Edinburgh and the Calvinist centres in Geneva, the Netherlands and Germany.The third attempt to turn the white cliffs into a red line is the farce we are watching now. The battle of Brexit came about not because of any serious demand ...”

“... destruction of state buildings and xenophobic attacks on Egyptians, Serbs, Koreans and, above all, black Africans; and the extent to which, brandishing the old Libyan flag of the 1951-69 era, the protesters identified their cause with the monarchy Gaddafi & Co overthrew. This divergence owed a lot to external influences. But it also owed much to the character ...”

“... IMF with an excessive primary surplus to keep the economy on keel, to over-extract and distribute black money to win office and exercise power. That, at least, would have been one line open to defenders of the party. In practice, the more typical mitigation was to point to the personal probity, in some cases the heroic record, of those in charge of ...”

“... her mother died of cancer, and three years later her father also died: her eldest brother, Michael, took legal guardianship of Stein and their brother Leo. He was such a talented businessman and investor that Stein had a private income for life.Then followed the period of Stein’s education. In 1893, when she was nineteen, she enrolled at the Harvard ...”

“... with Menderes’s, Demirel’s brand of populism ended in larger deficits, higher inflation, wider black markets and lower growth. Deteriorating economic conditions were compounded by increasing civil violence, as the far right stepped up its campaign against the left, and a medley of revolutionary groups hit back. Worst affected were Alevis – communities ...”

“... whose names were a constant struggle for her. ‘You know, darling the actor!’ she’d say of Michael Caine. ‘The curly-haired one who kills all the nignogs with the hay tutus and enormous spears in that film your father likes, I call him Alfie.’ She sold arrangements to Jean Shrimpton, Alec Guinness, Tony Blackburn, and others whose names she got ...”

“... The latter envisages a kind of global ethics, ambitious and unwieldy: the echoes here are from Michael Dummett and Onora O’Neill and might be dismissed as utopian, were it not for the fact that human movement across borders is set to continue, with or without an international consensus about how it’s regulated.In Europe, the most startling ...”

“... with a publisher with authors like James, Strindberg, Ford and Belloc historically on its list. As Michael Barber, an earlier biographer of Powell, without access to his archives, remarked, it was a period where a little privilege went a long way. There is no reason to doubt that at least in his first year in the capital, Powell felt at sea in London, of ...”